Zdeňka Hejn Edlová built a lubricants business worth half a billion

Zdeňka Hejn Edlová founded the company Lubricant thirty-three years ago without knowing anything about lubricants at all. Today her firm is one of the biggest suppliers in the industry in Czechia, operates in four countries, and has an annual turnover approaching half a billion crowns.

The company's name, Lubricant, initially drew puzzled looks and raised eyebrows from Czechs. But Edlová knew exactly where she wanted to take her business from the very start. The company itself doesn't manufacture lubricants — it works as a trading and technical operation: arranging supplies, advising clients, and offering oils, greases, pastes, process and cooling fluids, emulsions and degreasing agents. It partners with a German manufacturer, together with whom it also takes part in research and development.

Among the company's roughly two thousand clients are giants such as Škoda Auto, Magna, Tatra, Matador, Brano, Viva, České dráhy, Kostal and US Steel.

Edlová ended up in an industry traditionally seen as a man's world almost by accident. After the revolution, she worked as an authorised representative for a German acquaintance, Toni Spät, whose company dealt in dental equipment. The instruments needed a special, safe lubricant, which is how they came into contact with the Munich-based company OKS. There, the elderly owner, on learning that Edlová was from Czechia, suggested she try her hand at this business back home. So, together with her colleague Toni, she founded Lubricant.

“I remember going into a negotiation with a room full of men and presenting the company — they all laughed and asked if I had any gels. And I said: ‘Gentlemen, no gels, but we do have a special food-safe lubricant you can even lick.’ That's what disarmed them,” the entrepreneur recalls.

To get up to speed, she bought up specialist literature, travelled to tribology courses in Germany, and personally studied how gearboxes were built at factories, including Škoda's plant in Mladá Boleslav. She has kept full, one-hundred-percent control of her business, turning down offers to sell — the German company Lubcon, among others, has shown interest in buying Lubricant.